Did speaking English as a second language impact Zelensky in THAT meeting with Trump?

Much has been said about the catastrophic meeting at the White House last Friday between Ukrainian President Zelensky and the US President and Vice President. Did tempers flare and the whole thing get out of hand unnecessarily? Did the verbal clash simply expose the underlying fault lines between the two sides? Or was it a planned ambush, purposefully displayed before the world’s TV cameras? They’ve been called the 10 minutes that will change the course of the war in Ukraine. Whether that’s true or not, it was, as President Trump said ‘great TV’ (as a TV person that makes me wince a little, but I see the point) that will be dissected for years to come.

But there’s an angle that I think has been overlooked in much of the commentary: the fact that Volodymyr Zelensky was speaking in his second language. In fact, English may technically not even be his second but actually his third language (he is fluent in Russian and Ukranian). The point is, he’s definitely not a native English speaker, and even though he is fluent, his grammar is often flawed and you can tell he sometimes can’t find the right words.

I don’t, of course, mean this as criticism. I’m guessing Zelensky has been too busy over the past three years to work on his IELTS (International English Language Testing System) qualifications with some elocution lessons thrown in for good measure.

But the way he speaks English may well have had an impact on the disastrous turn of the Trump/Vance conversation. In the clip that I’ve isolated above, you can see the moments when it all went horrifically wrong. JD Vance had already been accusing Zelensky of ‘bringing people on propaganda tours’ and asking whether Ukraine was having problems with recruitment, while Trump looked on impassively. But it’s this phrase from Zelensky that triggers an exchange with President Trump.